As is known in the prior art, an in-vehicle antenna may be installed as an element of a Bluetooth® module of an electronic apparatus for vehicles, such as a navigation apparatus. An antenna fabricated through sheet metal working of a metal plate is often used as such an antenna in order to reduce costs (for example, JP 2013-201511 A).
Such a sheet metal antenna is connected with a coaxial cable to transmit or receive a signal to or from an electronic apparatus; however, the coaxial cable may be pulled at a time when the sheet metal antenna is installed on a casing of the electronic apparatus or during work such as mating of a connector. This may cause unsoldering at the soldered part where the coaxial cable is connected to the sheet metal antenna or disconnection of the coaxial cable at the soldered part, which may result in deterioration in integrity of the soldered part. Conversely, defects do not occur when the work is performed slowly and carefully, however, production efficiency is impaired. In addition, in-vehicle apparatuses are in mounting environment in which vibration or temperature change is continuously applied. Stress caused by vibration of the coaxial cable may be applied to the soldered part as well, and cracks may easily occur on the solder through the repeated increase and decrease of temperature.
To avoid a tensile load applied to the soldered part, the coaxial cable may have a sufficient extra length. In the in-vehicle apparatuses, however, an excessively long cable may disadvantageously cause resonation that applies stress to the soldered part, or may contact with other components to cause abnormal noise. It is thus difficult to simultaneously solve the aforementioned disadvantages.
JP2011-134701 A discloses a fixing configuration of an antenna and a cable that seeks to address these concerns. In this fixing configuration, a cable 400 is fixed to a resin radiator 200 having an antenna pattern 220 with use of two cable connection pins 300. In the fixing configuration disclosed in JP2011-134701 A, however, a signal line 450 of the cable 400 is not soldered to the antenna pattern 220. Therefore, connection reliability between the signal line 450 and the antenna pattern 220 is low. Further, the cable connection pins 300 in JP2011-134701 A are fabricated through a drawing process of an elastic metal plate, and are fixed, through thermal fusion, to the resin radiator 200 that is separately fabricated. Accordingly, work to fix the cable 400 to the connection pins 300 is necessary. Both this work and the manufacturing of the cable connection pins 300 increase costs.